In the early 1990s, V. Pelevin was included in the circle of authors of fantastic literature, then was declared a postmodernist. The material of his works is the Soviet and post-Soviet reality, perceived through the prism of the writer's opposition to the everyday world and getting the character of a certain ghostiness. Situations in his novels and short stories are, as a rule, conditional, fantastic and even mystical in nature. His allegories, dystopias, and fantasy can only be perceived in the light of the grotesque, although Pelevin's conventionality has a hidden character that does not always reveal the mechanisms of connecting objective reality with the surreal world. Pelevin's creative style is characterized by the overlapping of objective and metaphysical, social and existential, psychological and symbolic principles of representation. The writer creates his own worlds, carefully choosing the details by which we unmistakably recognize modern life: these are everyday realities, books, songs, slogans. As I. Rodnyanskaya notes, he has a "keen sense of the signiness" of objects and things that form the concept of "the current lifestyle" (I. Rodnyanskaya). This world was not invented by us / / Novy Mir, 1999. N 9. p. 212). At the same time, the author's life material itself is secondary and functional. page 44 Despite all the richness of everyday details, his prose tends to be emphatically enlarged metaphorical, even, as many critics (R. Arbitman, D. Bykov, A. Genis, V. Kuritsyn, L. Filippov) note, to a language that is understandable only to initiates - to esotericism and-hence-to maximum semantic generalization. Meanwhile, the very variety of forms (speech, in particular) that create a picture of this ghostly life allows us to speak about the movement of his prose in line with the great form-creating trend that is manifested in the work of Makanin, Petrushevskaya and many other authors. The world of Pelevin's texts is built on the same model, from typical, thoug ... Read more